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From: Woody on 21 Jun 2010 17:49 Woody <usenet(a)alienrat.co.uk> wrote: >> I remember trying to talk them into a Tatung Einstein when they were >> being discontinued, and desperately wanted a Z88. > > I desperately wanted one of those too. They had them in dixons but I couldn't get one. And if by magic <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/vintage_computer_fair/> -- Woody
From: Elliott Roper on 21 Jun 2010 17:51 In article <940986122298848024.036456usenet-alienrat.co.uk(a)news.individual.net>, Woody <usenet(a)alienrat.co.uk> wrote: > SteveH <italiancar(a)gmail.com> wrote: <snip> > > Going with 6809 processors rather than Z80 gave it a technologial > > edge, > > but very few applications seemed to take advantage of this. > > I disliked the 6809 quite a lot. Don't know why, as you say, it should > be good but I never got on with it I did largish commercial projects on both and ended up with the opposite bias. 6809 felt like a cute little pdp-11 that ran out of money before they could finish it. I did a telemetry thing that ran the receiver section of Australia's old coastal radio service from the transmitter site. It had a lovely simple debug device and was a joy to write code for. The Z80 was still a grotty 8080 at heart, overhyped to high buggery at the time. I did the complete firmware for a specialised block mode video terminal used for typesetting. My view was soured by the flaky ICE-box needed for development. Its MTBF was shorter than the time it took to assemble link and locate my code. And the only tech that Intel had that could fix it was based in Perth and I was in Sydney. I went fixed price on that job and ended up making $2 per hour over nearly a year! It finally worked and ran for years, but I still curl up with embarrassment thinking about it. -- To de-mung my e-mail address:- fsnospam$elliott$$ PGP Fingerprint: 1A96 3CF7 637F 896B C810 E199 7E5C A9E4 8E59 E248
From: Peter Ceresole on 21 Jun 2010 17:56 SteveH <italiancar(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Oh indeed. I loved the 6128. What I'd class as my first 'proper' > computer. I used it for many years, wrote a lot of scripts on it, using Protext/Promerge/Prospell on ROM- and also CP/M 3 on ROM. It was really an astonishingly capable machine. In Lime Grove, Peter Snow and I were the only people who brought in and used our own computers. He had an IBM XT, I had the CPC 6128. The Amstrad was faster and better in every way, and of course cost a fraction of the IBM. -- Peter
From: D.M. Procida on 21 Jun 2010 18:20 Woody <usenet(a)alienrat.co.uk> wrote: > > I remember trying to talk them into a Tatung Einstein when they were > > being discontinued, and desperately wanted a Z88. > > I desperately wanted one of those too. They had them in dixons but I > couldn't get one. Are you still desperate for one? Daniele
From: Rowland McDonnell on 21 Jun 2010 18:27
SteveH <italiancar(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig(a)flur.bltigibbet.invalid> wrote: > > > > That is understandable. The dragon was bad enough, why would you want to > > > expand on that? > > > > <cough> The Dragon had some interesting features that made is a lot > > better than is apparent from the basic specs. Or most common usage, for > > that matter... > > It had (has) a very good keyboard - remember, it was priced up as a > Spectrum competitor, so it was a bit of a revalation to get a proper > keyboard, rather than squidgy bits of rubber. > > Going with 6809 processors rather than Z80 gave it a technologial edge, Technological /difference/. For sure the 6809 had clever tricks the Z-80 didn't; but the Z-80 was quite neat in its own way - after all, they both had the ability to perform 16 bit operations by pairing 8 bit registers (well, I know the Z80 can and I'm told the 6809 can). The Dragon could have been so much more than it was, from what I read, given what the 6809 could do - but the cleverness the 6809 offered never really seemed to be taken advantge of in that machine from what I picked up overnight. OS 9 looks rather neat - if *that* had been the way things had gone in Dragon-land, something staggering could have turned up, from what I've read. Good solid useful computing from a deadly serious OS running on cheap but capable hardware - oh yes, if that had gone somewhere... Think `Amstrad, but with a good technical vision and without so much corner cutting and penny-pinching'. > but very few applications seemed to take advantage of this. > > It was the only 'home' computer to support analogue joysticks The BBC Micro was a home micro of the same era that had four A-D inputs standard, intended for analogue joysticks (and on the same port: game switch inputs, and a light pen input). The usual Beeb joysticks were - umm - nicer - than the usual Dragon joysticks, too. Yes, we had both. I said `nicer' because I never actually used the Dragon joysticks on the Dragon, but they felt a bit tacky in comparison. Robust, mind - impressively so, actually. > and have > an 'industry standard' parallel printer port, too. The BBC Micro also had one of those. - not to mention an RS232-compatible (if wired up right, and for most applications) RS423 serial port. I read a little on the Dragon last night, and I'm sure they ever got serial ports - unless there was some third-party add-on that I've not yet found out about. Beebs have a whole shed load of other interfaces - I mention that because if you want to talk about /that/ side of things, you need to look at the BBC Micro, which had more built-in connectivity than any other 8 bit home micro ever. That's `built-in' *and* `8 bit' *and* `home micro'... RS-423 serial, printer parallel, user parallel, floppy disc, cassette, Econet (optional), 1 MHz bus, Tube second processor interface, A-D input, and a lightpen and games controller port. Three video outputs too - RGB, composite video, PAL modulated video. Four (expandable to 16) paged ROM sockets accessible via memory paging, third party paged /RAM/ expansion available using those ROM sockets even for first gen Beebs. Optional hardware speech synthesis. A four tone one noise channel sound generator feeding mono sound output. (Umm. Think it was 4+1 sound; maybe 3+1? I've got the User Guide behind me and the Wikip page open, and perversely I'm refusing to look it up but spend longer than it'd take to do so typing this. Strange beastie, the human mind) Dragons are nice, and they have their good points - but when it comes to 8 bit home micros, the BBC Micro is the big beast when it comes to standard equipment. Almost everyone else used MS Basic. Beebs used a highly developed form of the language which had proper structuring /and/ a built-in assembler, and a host OS that was really quite clever, in a simple way - you could use OS commands directly from Basic, and the OS ROM would see to it that if any ROM installed knew what the hell that command meant, it'd get to see it. If not, you got told `bad command', but only after all installed ROMs had been give a look at it. Just start the line you're typing with a * That's all it takes. Clever, eh? It's very simple to implement, marvellously useful. The only other micros of the time I knew of that felt so /neat/ were the Sinclair machines - oh look, they came from fenland too, didn't they? > Oh, and you could run it at double clock speed with a simple POKE. ISTR > it's POKE 65535,1 The BBC Micro had a 2MHz CPU but a 4MHz RAM bus speed so as to get full CPU performance while also allowing the video circuitry half the clock ticks so it could get on with its job while the CPU ran flat out. (Apple ][s did so too - I gather it was a common trick on 6502 systems). You couldn't run a Beeb at double speed because it was running as fast as that circuitry could be run reliably - surely if the Dragon could be run at double speed reliably, then the manufacturers would have set it up to do that by default? So, erm - go on, tell me more about this speed-up trick. Another point raised by your point above, if you want to talk about technical goodness: the BBC Micro had an OS, just about - controlling things with direct memory access was deprecated in favour of calling ROM-based MOS routines, fully documented in the Advanced User Guide. No PEEK or POKE commands in BBC Basic, either - you used the ? memory access operator, being a more powerful approach. Or you could use the 6502 assembler built in to the Basic ROM to put routines into RAM. Or maybe you'd call specialised code by name supplied in one of many utilities ROMs available for the Beeb - using the same mechanisms as used to access standard MOS commands (`machine operating system' is what they called it). > <mine's the green anorak with a red dragon on the back> Mine's the one you can find by executing PROC(fetchcoat). (he said, reminding you that BBC Basic had proper structuring available via named procedures and functions, if then else, and repeat-until loops. Not to mention local variable scoping inside procs and fns, if you wanted it) > > Me? Oh, I never really used one - but I've looked into them a bit, and > > I think my dad probably has one in a cupboard somewhere (a boring normal > > Dragon 32; if so, I might get it one day). > > I still have mine. And the dot matrix printer bought soon after. We had an old teletype. I left the BBC Micro running a `find me a prime number' programme overnight, printing as it went (said program couldn't store all the primes the Beeb found, on account of lack of RAM). Poor old teletype was dead come breakfast time. :-((( > Way back in the day I wrote a very simple 'notepad' type application so > I could type up my homework on it. I wrote a university project report on our BBC Micro, using a ROM-based WP (View or Wordwise: I don't recall) as a text editor to prepare a LaTeX source file, which was transferred using 5.25" floppy from a different Beeb at Manchester Uni via a ROM-based version of the Kermit comms program down a serial port to a Sun workstation, thence to an Apollo[1] workstation for TeXing (and editing via Emacs), thence out via an HP LaserJet Blah. Top that ;-) Rowland. (hoping that someone will) [1] No idea what OS the Sun was running; at the time, they seemed to have half the OSes in the world running on various Suns at Manchester U.'s EE department, don't ask me why and btw I always think of Manchester Uni as `Owens'[2], don't have a convenient `normal mode' expression for the place. The Apollo box was running on Apollo's Domain OS Unix-alike network-savvy deep cleverness. [2] Back in the 1980s when I was studenting there, you had `Owens', UMIST, `the Poly' and `Salford' as the four Manchester HE establishments that counted. Well, when trying to refer to which educational establishment you're meaning when you're actually in the actual /city/ of Manchester, saying `Manchester' is a bit pants, innit? And Manchester university grew out of Owens college, and UMIST people know that, and probably got irritated at still being called `the tech' after they got their charter... -- Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell(a)dog.physics.org Sorry - the spam got to me http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking |